Images from the forthcoming coffee table book.
With $8,000 to go and 30 hours left to her Kickstarter campaign, Sagashus Levingston walked into Divine Transformation Salon on Madison’s south side, looking for help. After hearing about the project, the salon’s owner, Fontainious Webb, made a generous contribution and offered ideas for more funding possibilities. As clients trickled in, support began to swell.
Levingston is an artist, activist and UW-Madison Ph.D. candidate in English. She was seeking funds that day in July to self-publish a book, Infamous Mothers, an offshoot of her dissertation in which she seeks to answer the question: Can marginalized black mothers contribute to social movements and become agents of social change?
It’s not something she saw while reading fiction. “These moms — teen moms, baby moms or single moms, women formerly addicted to drugs, stigmatized women — were not recognized as change-makers in regular novels,” says Levingston. So she set out to profile women in the community who represented these voices.
Infamous Mothers is a coffee table book featuring 22 inspirational profiles of Madison-area women who overcame personal struggle and social alienation to make a difference in the public sphere. Self-expressive photographs and unedited stories told in each woman’s own words give voice to what Levingston calls “the too often unheard.”
Levingston, who has raised six children — five as a single mom, while earning a bachelor’s degree and doctorate — has stories of her own. Members of her paternal family worked in the “sex industry as an alternative to domestic labor or factory work,” and her mother’s side included college graduates, mostly women, who never escaped poverty.
“I come from a weird hybrid of educated folks and substance abusers,” says Levingston, 38, who grew up in low-income housing on Chicago’s South Side. “Three of my 11 siblings died because of drug abuse.” She learned about other possibilities at Lake Forest Academy, a boarding school in Chicago’s northern suburbs.
With this uncommon background, Levingston believes she is in a position to present a nuanced perspective on the lives of black women. “We either tell stories about women who are living these perfectly pristine lives, or we’re telling stories about women who are stuck in some kind of pathology,” says Levingston. “I want to disrupt this either-or narrative to tell stories of women who inhabit complexity that society doesn’t acknowledge.”
Author Sagashus Levingston raised six children while earning multiple degrees.
In February 2016, Levingston located a funder and began interviewing subjects for the book. But with the project solidly underway, and a release date of April 2017, Levingston and the project’s funder parted ways amicably. It then became critical for Levingston to find the money she needed to publish.
By July 30, the Kickstarter deadline, Levingston raised her goal of $25,000, crediting the fundraiser success to enormous community support. She is now planning to compensate artists who have contributed time and materials.
Chris Charles, a photographer, graphic designer and brand consultant based in North Carolina, and Tanisha Lynn Pyron, an “infamous woman” and Chicago photographer who assisted him, are on Levingston’s accounts payable list. Charles shot 15 of the 22 photographs at the Chicago Cultural Center, and Pyron shot seven more at Monona Terrace.
“My process was to photograph with dignity, regardless of backgrounds — to anti-stereotype,” says Charles. “Instead of images of downtrodden black women with multiple children — what we typically see in media — I asked how they want the world to see them.”
Levingston met one of the book’s subjects, Lenora Rodin, 61, while tutoring at the UW Odyssey Project, a rigorous accredited humanities class for people with economic challenges. Rodin projects an aura that comes from a life well led. “I look great, don’t I?” she asks an Isthmus reporter. Then adds: “I smoked crack, drank, I was a whore.”
Now clean for 25 years, Rodin, a certified nursing assistant with extensive on-the-job training, has built a successful career working in senior care. “I have much to be thankful for,” she says. “I have one daughter, six grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and I’m married to a doctor. Many women who have been through my life are not here anymore.”
Lolita, 49, another woman in the book from Madison, says telling her story publicly was a life-changing experience. “I’ve been a crack addict my whole life, never took the opportunity to grow,” she says. “When Levingston asked me what empowers me, I realized it came from speaking my truth.”
Five days after meeting Levingston, who is now her mentor, Lolita (who asked Isthmus to withhold her last name) entered rehab and is now in recovery. She is finally using her certification to teach early childhood education.
Pyron says working on the project made her feel less alone: “You feel no one gets it, then you come into a community of women like these mothers who made it, are still making it. We’re sisters now.”
